There was a theme of exploring the questions about "why we should care about digital preservation". The Library of Congress debuted this video, now available on their YouTube channel:

And I presented two sets of slides about Memento. One was in a break out session and focused on some of the details of http transactions as well as TimeBundles & TimeMaps, but the first presentation was in a plenary session in which I closed with an example of why digital preservation is important. For a recent conference submission, a reviewer asked:

Is (sic) there any statistics to show that many or a good number of Web users would like to get obsolete data or resources?

The answer we presented was that replaying the experience, as visualized through web resources, can be more compelling than a summary. The example concludes with an example about Hurricane Katrina.

The day after NDIIPP, I was headed to Maastricht, The Netherlands to attend IETF 78 with Herbert Van de Sompel. We are working on an RFC for Memento, the first step of which is writing an Internet Draft which we hope to submit to the IETF soon. We learned a great deal about the ID/RFC process and met with several people who will help guide us through the process. Thanks to Mark Nottingham, we were even able to pitch Memento at the httpbis working group (see the agenda). Initial feedback was cautiously positive, but we were told by several people "I look forward to reading the Internet Draft".

And just for Johan's amusement, I had Herbert take the picture of me in Maastricht, next to giant french fries...